Consumers of resources often have economic and/or environmental incentives to engage in conservation. Many such resources, such as electricity, natural gas, and water are scarce and/or expensive; in addition, their use can have negative environmental consequences. Increased awareness of the environmental and economic impacts of resource usage has caused individuals, organizations, and governments to engage in efforts to reduce consumption through a wide variety of resource-saving and renewable energy technologies. Examples include photovoltaic and solar thermal panels, energy-efficient heating systems, water- and power-conserving appliances and equipment, and the like. In addition to the incorporation of efficient or renewable energy technology, consumer behavior plays a critical role in resource use. Changes in behavior can substantially reduce resource use.
In the description provided herein, the terms “user”, “customer”, and “entity” are used interchangeably to refer to either an individual user or a group of users. A “user”, “customer”, or “entity” may therefore include any or all of an individual user, household, company, organization, or any definable groups (which may be defined according to any relevant criteria, such as for example social, economic, geographic, demographic, and/or other criteria).
Conservation efforts are more effective when entities receive tangible feedback showing them the results of their efforts. Traditionally, such feedback has been limited and nonspecific; often, the only feedback an entity receives is the monthly utility bill. Without more specific information, a homeowner, renter, business owner, or other defined group might experience changes in their utility bill from one month to the next without knowing which appliances, usage patterns, or choices are responsible for the changes. Some entities, such as those whose utilities are paid by others, receive no feedback on their resource usage at all. With limited or non-existent information the entity is unable to effectively isolate and identify appliances and/or equipment that are responsible for the greatest resource usage. Conservation efforts are greatly hampered by this lack of information.
It is also useful for entities to see how their resource consumption compares against that of others. Entities may be interested in comparing their resource usage against any of a variety of benchmarks, including their own historical usage and/or usage of other entities, including for example, average use by all similarly defined entities, average use by a similar demographic of consumers within a comparable geographic or climatic region, a cross-section of similar entities, a specific community of other entities, and the like. In some circumstances, it may be useful and desirable for entities to compete against each other to minimize resource use. Existing resource usage monitoring technologies typically lack a mechanism for an entity to compare its resource usage with that of other entities. Visual comparison of consumption by an entity with the resource use of other entities is useful both at an instant in time and as a comparative trend of resource use over time.
An entity may also wish to make its resource usage data public, or to share it with certain other entities, for example in a social network, website, newsgroup, or other forum. Publication of such data may be useful for social purposes, for marketing purposes, or to motivate members of one's own group and other groups to increase their conservation efforts. Existing resource usage monitoring techniques generally do not provide effective, intuitive, and convenient mechanisms for sharing data in this manner.
Entities may also wish to compare a current temporal pattern of consumption with a previously established temporal pattern of consumption over either a defined time period (e.g. this week with last week) or with a long-term pattern of consumption over similar time periods (e.g. hourly data for this week compared with median hourly consumption for all previous week's at this particular season). This may help identify the effect of certain events or changes on energy consumption. Existing resource usage technologies do not provide an easy way to compare temporal patterns in this way; it is therefore difficult for entities to establish a cause-and-effect relationship that can help improve understanding of the effectiveness of resource conservation efforts.
Existing resource usage monitoring products fail to provide these features. Kill A Watt is an electricity usage monitor, available from P3 International Corporation of New York, New York, providing functionality for measuring resource usage of individual plug loads or appliances. TED (The Energy Detective) is an electricity monitor, available from Energy, Inc. of Charleston, S.C. and described at www.theenergydetective.com, providing electricity usage information on an in-home digital readout. The PowerCost Monitor, available from Blue Line Innovations, Inc. of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, provides electricity usage information on a similar hand-held readout. None of these products provides a comprehensive mechanism for collecting, displaying, sharing, and comparing resource usage data. Nor do these products offer a computer interface allowing an entity to mark an event (such as the install date of a device) and compare pre-event usage with post-event usage.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method of collecting resource usage data with minimal user effort, and of presenting such data in a visually compelling format that allows comparison of current resource usage with prior resource usage during a similar period of time and to compare their resource use with the resource usage of others at a particular moment and/or over time. What is further needed is a system and method that enables visualization and/or sharing of resource usage data in an intuitive, user-controllable manner.
What is further needed is a mechanism for identifying actions or events that result in changes in or anomalous patterns of resource use so that an entity can better understand and respond to cause-and-effect relationships.